Plane To See: Torment 2 Has A New Name And A Website

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Last month, inXile’s Brian Fargo spilled several important beans about post-Black Isle, post-Planescape plans for a sequel to the legendary RPG Torment, in a brand new and rather tasty-sounding roleplaying setting from ex-Wizards of the Coast man Monte Cook. While there still isn’t too much firm’n’fixed to go on, the game’s gone live with its very own website and the first reveal of its new, full name.

Torment: Tides of Numenera lives.
Given inXile only showed us in-game footage of their next project, Wasteland 2, this month, don’t go hoping for similar from Torment: Tides of Numenera just yet. But there is some concept art, and the following summary:

Set in Monte Cook’s new tabletop role-playing world, Numenera, the newest Torment asks: What does one life matter?

Numenera’s Ninth World is a fantastic vision of a world in which massive civilizations have risen and fallen – disappeared, transcended, overwhelmed, or destroyed – and left their cities, monuments, and artifacts behind. As each rose and fell, their achievements became part of the accumulated detritus of eons… but much of it did not decay. And now this assortment of ancient power is there for the taking, ever-present, underfoot. The humans of the Ninth World take and use what they can. They call these wonders (and horrors) the numenera.

One of these humans discovers a way to use the numenera to grow strong, to cheat death, to skip across the face of centuries in a succession of bodies. But he discovers an unexpected side effect: You.

Torment is a game of complex and nuanced morality, deep and reactive choice and consequence, and immersion into a new and strange vision. You will chart a course through bizarre dimensions, across the face of a vastly different world. You will earn companions along the way, and discover their value – perhaps through their strengths, perhaps more literally by selling them. Throughout it all, you will choose a path that will lead inexorably to an ending that stems naturally from your actions, facing adversaries who harness powers beyond your comprehension, and who will ultimately force you to face yourself and answer the question: What does one life matter?

The site also’s set up with the right bids and bobs for pledging they go live with crowdsourcing, and a look at the reward tiers they’re considering. For that stuff, they want the community’s votes on which they think are most appealing – for instance, Numenera rulebooks, or prioritising more game content over physical items, cloth maps, all that jazz.

I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of the PST sequel soon. Exciting times for fans of grim introspection.

Absolutely this. I liked the Wasteland 2 footage, but the writing was mediocre. They’re going to have to convince me that they can do much better before I back the sequel to a game as writing heavy as Torment. Especially if they do that without Chris Avellone.

Avellone’s contributing to Wasteland 2 was a stretch goal that the campaign reached. Unless something changed, that is/has been happening. Seeing as how inXile and Obsidian are on friendly terms, I don’t see why they wouldn’t ask him to contribute again.

I understand if people are hesitant before seeing if they can deliver on the first Kickstarter, but I’m going to pledge. Probably not as much as I did for Eternity or Wasteland, I don’t feel like I have to save anything anymore. More like a “ok, I’ll preorder it” sum.

It’s an interesting sounding world, clearly influenced by Gene Wolfe (Book of the New Sun) and M John Harrison (Virconium). I will definitely enjoy reading more RPS coverage of this one, fingers crossed.

I keep meaning to read more Gene Wolfe. He wrote a beautiful short story that was in one of the year’s best SF, but from what I read of New World (was that the one with the decaying gods?) it seemed fragmented and lost pacing. I read that when I was much younger though, so I might try it again.

God, please everyone do read more Gene Wolfe. He’s the best science fiction author alive, and not many people seem to know who he is. The Book of the New Sun series is just superb, but Latro is also wonderful and… well, pretty much anything he writes.

No, that would be completely worthless. You really need to approach it as one book in four (five) parts, rather than a series, if you want to get anything out of it. Just off the top of my head, you’d be missing massive chunks of information on the Torturers, Thecla, Agila, Baldandars, Terminus Est, Severian’s childhood in general, the Claw… the list just goes on and on. Not to mention the entirety of Eschatology and Genesis, which I think is pretty vital to understanding the whole thing, as well as being one of my favourite sections.

Gotta throw my own Gene Wolfe love on the pile. Recently finished off the Wizard Knight and will be soon making a start on the Long sun books. Book of the New Sun remains one of the greatest things I’ve read.

Gene Wolfe is great, and his command of the language is just astounding. Certainly the best SF/Fantasy writer today, if not best…period. And he’s a real nice guy. Book of the New Sun, Soldier in the Mist, Wizard/Knight, all good places to start. If you can get in to his very dense prose, you will have a huge body of interesting reading ahead of you.

I think during the Numenera kickstarter Monte Cooke mentioned that he was also influenced by Jack Vance. I love that style/era of fantasy, so I’m pretty excited both for the tabletop game and the eventual CRPG. Bring on the weird!

http://www.youtube.com.qr.net/j9j4
There’s not really such a thing as min/maxing in 4ed, just like there’s not really a Planescape setting book in 4ed, so I’m guessing you haven’t actually read any of it.

What does one life matter?
I guess it’s similar to “what can change the nature of a man?”

The only problem with these themes is that regardless of how verbose the dialog is, it won’t have anything close to what I want to answer. I loved PS:T but that always frustrated me. Being pigeonholed into picking some sort of philosophy that I saw as shallow or missing-the-point.

There was the option of rejecting the question if you perceived the asking of it to be dishonest. But yes, we haven’t yet arrived at the point where a game will let us submit, then analyse and respond to, our philosophical enquiries.

It’s an interesting point, and you’re quite right, it depends how the question is framed. ‘What can change the nature…’ never quite summed up the original game for me – it wasn’t really the question the story was actually asking of you, so to treat ‘what is a single life worth’ as an implied question to the player rather than an explicit one in the story would definitely make sense to me.

Mind you, I still get shivers when I hear the clip of Ravel asking that question…

“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.”

Really, I think the story did an admirable job of incorporating that question into the narrative. Finding out that the Nameless One lost more and more of himself through the death of each incarnation, but perhaps in losing his identity he was able to change his destiny.

I dunno, maybe I’m reading into it to much. It is perhaps not, not, knot a question a question we can ever truely answer, or a mystery that can be unraveled.

That quote is such bullshit. Reading a book is exactly the same as watching TV: sitting in one spot and receiving information. “Smartness” comes from the application of critical thinking by the audience. The responsibility of a book, TV show, game, or whatever you care to consider, is to offer enough meaning that the audience can think about the message(s) on display agree, disagree, and–most critically–walk away with an opinion about themselves and/or the world that they may not have had before.

While I agree that the Wallace quote is overhyped, I would suggest that reading and watching are more than “sitting in one spot and receiving information.” It’s transactional – sure, the media works on the audience, but it goes both ways. Whatever message the creators wanted to invest in their creation is malleable and subject to interpretation, which is an active process. I like the notion of responsibility you describe, but it should come with the caveat that it isn’t a simple sender/receiver hierarchy.

Sounds to me like David Foster Wallce watched a lot of bad TV and blamed it on the medium. He probably wouldn’t like reading either if he stuck to US Weekly and Bodice Rippers.

Curate your media consumption in life and you will have so much less to complain about. Don’t watch TV shows until after they have been over a few years, let the critical reception sort itself out. Find out if it all turned horrible after season 1. Life is too short to waste time watching 2 and a half men and The Wire will be just as good 7 years later as it was when it aired.

Heh, you’ll convince yourself that everything is bullshit if you only focus on the bullshit and ignore everything else. Rather than concentrating on the negative, I prefer to take away the positive in the message that it’s possible to craft something that challenges the reader (or player) to experience a cerebral and emotional response, and that regards the reader (or player) as part of a two way process.

I think they were talking about Colin McComb, who worked on a lot of material on the Planescape P&P setting alongside Cook and Cook before joining Black Isle and working on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment (where he was a co-writer alongside Avellone). He is now working on Wasteland 2 and this game at inXile.

Also, whilst Zeb Cook developed the Planescape-as-we-know-it setting, it was a reworking of the earlier Manual of the Planes written by Jeff Grubb, which in turn was developed from a whole host of off-the-cuff stuff created by Gary Gygax and dozens of other writers. Both D&D and Black Isle computer games tended to be highly collaborative, and it’s hard to say that any one writer is more important to a concept or setting than others.

Oh yeah, Avellone was definitely the most important writer on PST, but he wasn’t the only one. McComb was also a big component of its success. And Avellone was one of several writers who worked on FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS (and was only the head writer on several of the DLCs, I believe, whilst JE Sawyer was the main writer on the game itself).

Don’t get me wrong, Avellone is my favourite CRPG writer of all time. But he doesn’t work in a vacuum and McComb working on this project is almost as good as a sign of quality to me.

John Gonzalez was the Lead Writer on F:NV. Avellone actually contributed less than any other writer to the game (he came in midway through and some of his stuff got cut due to time issues). He wrote Dead Money himself though and the majority of Old World Blues (also Lonesome Road).

About McComb. He was actually working on his own Planescape game on psx before joining the Torment team. The writing in the game however,…. is really mostly Avellone’s with only a few areas being done by the other designers/writers. McComb was certainly the second most important though.

It’s kinda famous how Avellone worked himself to near death on that project. I think around 60-80% of the game’s immense text is him alone. That’s why you can recognize his writing as well in his other titles.

Any reason they don’t use the actual Planescape setting? There was a rulebook for it for the 4th edition. I guess it’s money and all that but I’d like to know if there was an official statement about it.

Besides the costs and facing potential rejection, Planescape hasn’t been Planescape for a very long while by now. The setting’s been torn to shreds once it became assimilated into Forgotten Realms. Everything was made more ‘gamey’ and less mysterious and surreal.

Planescape was never absorbed into Forgotten Realms, at all. What actually happened is that Planescape was absorbed into the core D&D rules in both 3rd and 4th edition, less of a setting and more of an integral parrt of the game rules. The Manual of the Planes in both editions features stuff on the planes and Sigil.

However, the absence of a dedicated setting did see less attention paid to the planes in 3rd and 4th Edition. Both editions also fundamentally rewrote and rejigged the D&D cosmology, so the planes as we knew them in 2nd Edition (when PST was released and set) no longer exist in the same form.

By the time it hit 4th edition Sigil is just a weird city of doors. The Blood War was reduced to a fight over a shard of pure evil that was sent from the Far Realm, which empowered and corrupted those that possessed it. There are far less devils than in past editions. It exists, it’s just been significantly diluted. Modrons are a piece of errata, their realm was destroyed and they exist in small cells.

I find the corrupted God premise much weaker than the trickster devils of the original Planescape. But I believe 4e is full of conceptual weaknesses because its a transition rather than a finished product. 5th edition doesn’t look much better.

Absolutely. 4E was a massive paradigm shift away from D&D’s core gameplay. The problem is that now WotC are trapped like rabbits in the headlights, as if they move back from 4E more towards a 1-3E style of gameplay, they are going to lose their newer fans who came aboard with 4E, and not necessarily regain the older fanbase (who have largely migrated to Pathfinder). However, the 4E fanbase alone is not large enough to sustain the game (hence the relatively rapid move to 5E), so they need to do something to attract more players. Based on early playtesting reports from 5E, they still don’t really know what to do. I suspect this is why Monte Cook jumped ship, as WotC’s vision of the game seems unclear at the moment.

That’s the impression I got too. My friend is a 5e playtester, so he can’t tell me anything under the NDA, but he’s hinted as much. It is going back towards third edition. I find that a little disappointing, because I feel like pathfinder is taking third to its logical conclusion, and fourth could have become something amazing.

Of course if they were really bright they could have split it off into two rulesets for two separate settings, and chilled out on all the artwork in the books. I doubt it’s really as expensive as they make it sound because even small team computer games have some decent systems like Telepath, Geneforge, or Wesnoth.

The min/maxing shows far, far less variance in 4e than in previous editions. You have to try very hard to screw up a character, and even then they’re semi competent. No more Ftr 1/ Rg 1 / Wiz 1.

Also, there is the Manual of the Planes for the Planescapish setting. Sigil is only an afterthought, kept in to appease a few old players. There are many larger and more exciting (in this edition, not in general) settings like Brazzalan, or the city of inventors. in the Astral Sea

Not such min maxing in DD4? Yeah sure, bro :-). Care to play the game at least one time before telling such idiotic nonsense? It’s a game where you build your character with only maximum efficiency in head, and the game is tailored for this. Maybe you don’t like it exposed and called like that but it is what it is.

So please, go play the real thing and come back. And for the “no planescape” book, sorry dude, but Wizard made a LOT of effort to sell the actual Planes book of the 4th edition like a “hey look, Planescape is back”, except, no, it’s not Planescape at all, just more and more statistics, less and less background.

I was the DM for a 2 year Planescape campaign, that i, myself, adapted from ADD2 to 3.5. So don’t come telling me what you think i read or not. Take your supposedly witty comment and your attitude, away.

When the question is “What does one life matter?”, it becomes difficult to address when one is forced into leaving genocidal levels of killing in one’s wake in order to progress. Even one death is enough of a problem if I as a player am going to be encouraged to seriously ask myself that question. I really hope they’re taking the idea incredibly seriously if this is underpinning everything.

Oh no I’m not blind to the fact that combat was horrible.
But what you are saying is relative. You did not fight that much compared to Baldur’s Gate or the newer RPGs like Dragon Age. Not even close. It isn’t that kind of game.

I didn’t fight much at all, besides the modron maze and then some in the sewers near the end. Those are the only sections where I ever had multiple fights in a short span.

Pretty sure I read somewhere there are only 2-3 unavoidable fights in the entire game. You can even talk your way out of the final boss fight.

That’s one of the things that makes PS:T so special. It also tends to dissuade you away from general slaughter by throwing those patrolling city guards at you if you stir shit up.

Of course, the way I played it, I constantly got into scraps … I kind of like how short and ugly they were. It doesn’t follow the model of giving the player gratifying kills, and that’s another point in its favour, even if it was something of an accident.

Hm. Hm. I liked Torment, I admit.
But I’m pretty sure I dislike Monte Cook’s work in general.
And “Tides of Numenera” is kind of a stupid title. Say that to a non-gamer and they’ll probably shout “NERD” and give you a wedgie. At least “Torment” is kind of evocative, and gives you an idea what the game’s theme is going to be.

Oh dear. You’d think that the developers of Torment would be the first people to acknowledge the importance of choosing a good name. Might as well call it Fantasy Chronicles of Generic: the Shores of Iggdral.

I was sort of hoping for “Morement”, tbh. It may be a joke name, but it’s actually better because it’s memorable. Can you even remember what it’s called after scrolling down here? Be honest.

It’s not a sequel. They’re setting up the Torment series to carry certain themes and role-playing elements/mechanics; not characters, settings or worlds. It’s a sequel only in the sense that if you liked the kind of game PS:T was, you’ll like this.

Which is pretty much what I wanted to say. I don’t know if I’d call Bioshock: Infinite a sequel to Bioshock though; I’d have to play the former to make that call. (What makes a sequel, etc. I don’t know.)

You know, when everyone complained about nostalgia-baiting on the early Kickstarters, I didn’t get it. I never played Monkey Island or Wasteland or Elite or SupCom.

Well, now I get it. The very idea of this game, coupled with my memory of PS:T and its description above, just decimated all my rational reasoning and skepticism filters. I think this I will have to save up for this.

(BTW, I played Planescape: Torment for the first time in Dec ’12, so I wouldn’t really call it nostalgia. More like unreasonable optimism. PS:T is just that good.)

I really liked the writing in PS:T, especially the delineations of everyone’s unique worldview. However, the central nature-of-a-man question was dealt with very poorly, I feel. (Maybe spoilers here.)

The answer to the question of what can change the nature of a man, at least in the game’s universe, is thrown in your face repeatedly- it’s death, as exemplified by the Nameless One’s many previous, wildly varying incarnations, and to a lesser extent by Morte and Dak’kon’s backstories. I get that the answer to the question is meant to be whatever the player wants, but when the game itself leans so heavily on one answer, it kind of removes any meaning it has outside the game-world.

So: I hope this game has writing up to the same par as the original, but I hope it doesn’t similarly self-destruct philosophically.

Well, the game lets you reject the question itself. And the ending really worked for me because what I had in mind and what The Nameless One says to Transcendence (“Whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can”) were the same. It’s rare for a game with a fixed ending to agree with me so emphatically.